Core Java APIs and programming techniques
Technologies related to Java APIs (application programming interfaces) and JDK (Java Development Kit) form the cornerstone of modern, enterprise-grade software development. Here we explore all the Java features that make the JVM great through programming tutorials, real-world code samples and expert opinions from Java champions.
Top Stories
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Tutorial
28 Apr 2025
How to build an AI agent tutorial with example
How do AI agents work? Are they like cron jobs? This walkthrough explains what AI agents can do, the basic principles that apply, and how to build your own AI agent using ChatGPT. Continue Reading
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Tip
28 Apr 2025
The state and future of Java desktop application development
In today's world of web application development and SaaS, what does the future hold for Java desktop applications? It's brighter than you might think. Continue Reading
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Tutorial
03 Jul 2013
Which EJB to use? Stateful, stateless and singleton session beans compared
When developing a service layer, Java architects are often challenged with which of the three session beans, stateful, stateless or singleton, should be used. Continue Reading
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Tip
30 Jun 2013
How to get the Hibernate Session from the JPA 2.0 EntityManager
This tip shows you how to get the Hibernate Session from the JPA EntityManager so you can perform functions only available from the JBoss Hibernate project. Continue Reading
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Tip
07 Jun 2013
Understanding the implicit dangers of software component re-use
Every software developers has the goal of component re-use, but there are implicit dangers in the practice that all developers must be aware of. Continue Reading
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Tip
06 Jun 2013
Mobile ALM Tip: Four ways to effectively move apps out of production
Moving applications out of production can be a mobile ALM challenge, but with these four tips, organizations will be minimizing the challenge of application decommissioning. Continue Reading
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Feature
09 Apr 2013
Alternative JVM languages: Scala explained
Watch this video lesson to learn the benefits of exploring the JVM alternative language Scala. Continue Reading
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Tip
21 Mar 2013
Tradeoff management key to successful software development techniques
To successfully develop software, tradeoffs must be made in cost, quality and time. Proper tradeoff management results in quality software. Continue Reading
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Feature
06 Mar 2013
How Headless Android is Impacting Embedded Systems Development
Given the fact that Android is targetted towards the smartphone market, you wouldn't expect any significant interest in Android from the embedded market. However, making Android 'headless', and working with it on an embedded device has a variety of compelling use cases, and accordingly it is becomming ever more popular. Continue Reading
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Feature
21 Feb 2013
Mobile ALM guidance: Android and iOS development is not ‘business as usual’
Mobile development presents new challenges to architects and solution developers, but guidance on the topic of mobile ALM (application lifecycle management) is lacking, and the industry is looking for answers. Continue Reading
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Feature
07 Feb 2013
Effective API development: How to create a beautiful Java API
There's an art to creating a beautiful Java API. Here we examine the art of effective API development with Layer 7's Mike Amundsen. Continue Reading
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Feature
06 Feb 2013
How to architect a modern distributed architecture
Building a distributed architecture involves many different components and many different strategies, from client server computing, to managing big data and content. Here we look at some basic strategies for tackling modern distributed architectures. Continue Reading
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Tip
16 Nov 2012
Try an Agile deployment strategy
Agile development methods hold value for more than planning, design, development and testing. A deployment strategy also benefits from Agile tactics. Continue Reading
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Tip
16 Nov 2012
Finding the cause helps solve future application deployment issues
Application deployment issues put a black mark on successful enterprise applications. Learn to guard your applications from the most common pitfalls. Continue Reading
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Tip
16 Nov 2012
Cloud deployment shows pros and cons for legacy applications
Legacy applications may benefit from cloud deployment, but there are a host of concerns to look at, too, when considering redeploying older applications. Continue Reading
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Feature
16 Nov 2012
Cloud Deployment Testing: Leveraging PaaS, Saas and IaaS
Many challenges arise when it comes time to deploy your applications, and if deployment goes wrong, the problems are incredibly visible to both the users and upper management. But with cloud computing, there is a better way to smooth out the deployment process. Continue Reading
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Feature
01 Nov 2012
Application lifecycle management: Best practices for improving the deployment process
Nothing is more visible to both clients and senior management than an applications that doesn't work. And the risk for failure is never higher than it is the moment after deployment. So how do you ensure deployment always goes smoothly. There is no silver bullet, but there are some best practices for deployment, which we will examine in this article. Continue Reading
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Feature
01 Jun 2012
Scaling Web applications with Scala, Clojure and Groovy
Scaling Web applications written in Java can be difficult due to thread concurrency and locking issues. However, immutable peripheral languages like Scala, Groovy, and Clojure can make scaling up more feasible. Continue Reading
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Feature
30 May 2012
Java EE 7 migration: Risk mitigation strategies
Some enterprise Java shops are weighing the risks of a migration to Java EE 7 against the potential benefits, which are incremental and cloud focused. Continue Reading
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Feature
22 Mar 2012
Project documentation and Agile development
Agile development has been very effective at reducing the need for extensive, ponderous documentation. However, this methodology has not done away with the need for documentation entirely. It has simply moved documentation from a foundational role to a supportive role. Continue Reading
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Tutorial
24 Feb 2012
Translate "Hello, world!" automatically via the Web browser
In this lesson, Cameron McKenzie will demonstrate how to build a Web application that automatically translates itself for various audiences based on the default language of the end user's Web browser. Continue Reading
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Tip
20 Feb 2012
Compare new Java Web application tools to the basics
When evaluating new Java Web application tools look back to the most basic Java development tools and see where the new tool takes you from there. Continue Reading
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Tutorial
10 Feb 2012
Installing the Java Development Kit (JDK) and setting JAVA_HOME
The first choice in application servers for many Java developers is the open source Apache Tomcat. Learn how to download and install the Apache Tomcat 6 servlet engine. Continue Reading
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Tip
26 Jan 2012
Java 7 and the intricacies of safe and unsafe casting
One of the problems with casting is that it does have the potential to cause a loss of precision, especially if the number that gets cast does indeed fall outside of the range of the target type. Here we will explain why this happens. Continue Reading
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Tutorial
12 Jan 2012
New Java 7 Features: How to Use a More Precise Rethrow in Exceptions from Project Coin
Afficionados of other languages such as Scala or Clojure are always slagging the fact that Java is too verbose and cumbersome. So, it's not too surprising to find out that Java 7 introduced a number of new facilities that can help to trim down the code an application developer is required to write. Continue Reading
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Tutorial
15 Dec 2011
New Java 7 Features: Binary Notation and Literal Variable Initialization
Now with Java 7, you can not only use standard decimal notation, or the beloved hex notation, but you can use binary notation as well. Here's a good look at the ins and outs of binary notation, with a focus on what you'll need to know in order to pass the Java Professional certification exam from Oracle. Continue Reading
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Feature
07 Nov 2011
Adding MVEL to the Java Developers Toolkit
By now you should be thoroughly convinced that as a Java developer you cannot afford to leave MVEL out of your toolbox, and that it fills a unique gap between complete programming environments like Groovy and Scala and expression languages like OGNL and JUEL. Continue Reading
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Tip
24 Jun 2011
Choosing the best Agile methodology for your development needs
To be Agile is to be active and involved. But how do we achieve these goals? Let’s look at some of the popular tools of the Agile trade. Continue Reading
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Tip
11 May 2011
How to successfully deploy BPM
BPM offers tremendous potential to organizations seeking to improve efficiency and ROI, but it takes a thoughtful approach. This article outlines some BPM best practices. Continue Reading
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Feature
28 Mar 2011
What to look for in an application server
What are the key parts of an application server that your application needs? Here's a quick overview. Continue Reading
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Feature
28 Mar 2011
What is an Application Server?
Historically, the Java professional has thought of the application server as a system that can support the deployment and runtime of Servlet and EJB applications. But that definition is changing. Continue Reading
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Tip
15 Mar 2011
Dependency Injection in Java EE 6 (Part 6)
In this last article of the series, we will cover portable extensions, available implementations as well as CDI alignment with Seam, Spring and Guice. Continue Reading
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News
28 Sep 2010
James Gosling Interview from Basementcoders.com
In this Basement Coders podcast, Jeff Genender interviews James Gosling live from San Francisco when JavaOne was taking place. Continue Reading
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Feature
29 Jul 2010
Dependency Injection in Java EE 6 - Part 5
This series of articles introduces Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE (CDI), a key part of the Java EE 6 platform. In this article we will discuss CDI’s interaction with JSF in detail. Continue Reading
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News
08 Mar 2010
Part 3 of dependency injection in Java EE 6
In this article we will discuss interceptors, decorators, stereotypes and events. In the course of the series, we will cover conversations, CDI interaction with JSF, portable extensions, available implementations as well as CDI alignment with Seam, Spring and Guice. Continue Reading
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News
03 Nov 2009
Dependency Injection in Java EE 6 - Part 1
Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE (CDI), a key part of the soon to be finalized Java EE 6 platform. Standardized via JSR 299, CDI is the de-facto API for comprehensive next-generation type-safe dependency injection for Java EE. Continue Reading
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News
01 Apr 2009
EJB 3.1 - A Significant Step Towards Maturity
Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) is a server-side component architecture for the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) platform, aiming to enable rapid and simplified development for distributed, transactional, secure and portable applications. Continue Reading
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News
01 Mar 2009
Intergrating BIRT with PHP
BIRT is a top-level, open-source, Eclipse project that provides business intelligence and reporting tools. Currently, BIRT is best known as a report-creation tool that supports multiple data sources and produces many different forms of output, including HTML, paginated HTML, PDF, Word, Excel, PPT, and postscript formats. Continue Reading
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News
01 Feb 2009
Java EE 6 Overview
The details of Java EE 6 have been getting hashed out for quite a few months in the JSR 316 expert group, which I am part of. The goal of this article is to give you an overview of the changes in Java EE 6 as well as encourage your feedback. Besides the work of the JSR 316 expert group itself, I'll also discuss the JSRs that are likely to comprise this release of the platform. Continue Reading
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News
01 Oct 2008
EJB 2.1: The Timer Service: Monson-Haefel's Guide to Enterprise JavaBeans
This fourth installment of Monson-Haefel's Guide to Enterprise JavaBeans describes the EJB Timer Service API, its use with entity, stateless session, and message-driven beans, and provides some criticism and suggested improvements of the Timer Service. Continue Reading
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News
01 Jul 2008
Scaling Your Java EE Applications -- Part 2
Java applications can be scaled vertically (on a single system), or horizontally (across multiple systems). But to do either, you have to understand all parts of the system and software. Not doing so could defeat the purpose of adding system resources or more systems. Wang Yu presents some surprising results of Java application scalability based on his experiences in a performance laboratory. The second installment of this series discusses scaling horizontally. Continue Reading
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News
01 May 2008
MapReduce Part II
MapReduce is a distributed programming model intended for parallel processing of massive amounts of data. This article describes a MapReduce implementation built with off-the-shelf, open-source software components. It shows you how to write resource-oriented applications for the Mule integration platform as a side effect of its implementation. Continue Reading
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News
01 Apr 2008
Part Three: New Features in EJB 3.1
This series of articles previews changes in EJB 3.1. EJB 3.0 brought simplicity to Java EE 5 by moving away from a heavyweight programming model. EJB 3.1 aims to build on those successes by moving further down the path of simplicity as well as adding much-needed features. This article covers asynchronous Session Bean invocation and EJB Lite. Continue Reading
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News
01 Jan 2008
Integrating Java and Erlang
This article is an introductory tour of Erlang by building a simple client server application. Following this we'll reverse engineer the application in pure Java using Jinterface, an open source Java library distributed with Ericsson's Open Telecom Platform. Then we'll wrap things up with a few words about hybrid systems development. Download and install Erlang and Java if you wish to try this at home. Continue Reading
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News
01 Jan 2008
New Features in EJB 3.1
This series of articles is a preview of the changes the EJB 3.1 expert group is working on for the next version of the Java EE specification. EJB 3.1 aims to build on those successes by moving further down the path of simplicity as well as adding a handful of much-needed features. Continue Reading
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News
01 May 2007
The Working Developer's Guide to Java Bytecode
In this article, we're going to examine the JVM bytecode set, disassemble some code to see how it works, and play with some tools that allow us to manipulate bytecode directly. Continue Reading
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News
01 May 2006
Distributed Computing Made Easy
In case you haven't noticed, distributed computing is hard. The problem is that it is becoming increasingly important in the world of enterprise application development. Continue Reading
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News
01 Feb 2006
Migrating JDBC Data Access Objects to use EJB3
In this article, we'll discuss what you need to do to migrate your DAO-based application to the EJB3 Java Persistence API. Continue Reading
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News
01 Aug 2005
Under the Hood of J2EE Clustering
More and more mission-critical and large scale applications are now running on Java 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Those mission-critical applications such as banking and billing ask for more high availability (HA), while those large scale systems such as Google and Yahoo ask for more scalability. Continue Reading
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News
01 Mar 2005
Best Practices for Risk-Free Deployment
The cost impact to a company of a failed project can be severe indeed. This document introduces the 3D™ methodology – a set of best practices and quality tools developed by BuildMonkey, which can be summarised as. Continue Reading
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News
01 Mar 2005
Velocity: A Template Engine OR A Rule Engine OR Both?
Most developers are familiar with Velocity as a great open source template engine and I don’t think I need to say much about its uses and features as a template engine. This paper compiles its features as a rule engine. Continue Reading
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News
12 Dec 2004
Internationalized Data in Hibernate
We've seen a few people using internationalized reference data where labels displayed in the user interface depend upon the user's language. It's not immediately obvious how to deal with this in Hibernate, and I've been meaning to write up my preferred solution for a while now. Continue Reading
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News
24 Jun 2004
Implementing Caching with AspectJ
Often in talks we give examples of common aspects, such as caching, pooling, auditing, security, persistence, and so on. Learn how to implement them using AspectJ. Continue Reading
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News
06 Apr 2004
Using the Quartz Enterprise Scheduler in J2EE
Quartz is an open source enterprise job scheduler. Learn the ins and outs of Quartz in the J2EE. Continue Reading
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News
01 Nov 2003
Maven Magic
Maven is a high-level, intelligent project management, build and deployment tool from the Apache project. There is nothing that Maven does that Ant cannot do. At the end of this article you will be able to build J2EE project artifacts using Maven. Continue Reading
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News
01 Aug 2002
EJB 2.1 Web Services (Part 1)
The driving force behind EJB 2.1 is the need for Enterprise JavaBeans technology to support Web services -- a need that in turn is driven by Microsoft's release of its mammoth .NET platform, which is a significant threat to J2EE, and to Java technology in general. Continue Reading
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News
01 May 2002
Understanding J2EE Application Server ClassLoading Architectures
The packaging mechanisms defined in Chapter 8 of the J2EE 1.3 specification provide a framework for pulling together all the pieces of a J2EE application. However, application server vendors are free to design a proprietary class loading hierarchy for obtaining the classes and resources found in an application. A class loading hierarchy is typically used to enable features such as hot redeployment and application independence. Continue Reading
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News
01 Jan 2000
Job Scheduling in J2EE Applications
Scheduling tasks in J2EE applications is a common need. File transfer applications need to transmit and receives files on a regular basis, except on holidays. Administrative applications need to send reminder emails to notify employees and customers about important events. Continue Reading
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News
01 Jan 2000
Professional Java Server Programming J2EE 1.3 Edition
The release of the 1.3 version of the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) represents the evolution of Sun Microsystems' server-side development platform into a more mature and sophisticated specification. Continue Reading